William R. Keech: in Memoriam

Excerpt

William R. (“Bill”) Keech was trained as a behavioral political scientist, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1965. In the early 1980s, when he already was a well-known mid-career scholar, he experienced a conversion toward a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of political economy and completed additional post-graduate work at the University of Michigan. He soon became a regular attendee at the annual Public Choice Society meetings and his work developed unique perspectives clearly rooted in the public choice tradition while also challenging some of its central tenets. Keech taught at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill from 1965 through 1996, chaired and later taught at the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University from 1997 to 2006, and served as Research Professor of Political Economy at Duke University from 2006 through his retirement in 2018. …